OLNEY, Maryland — Tora the Tiger, Shonti the Tiger, Sumsara the Tiger, Jai the Tiger, Kali the Tiger, and Nairobi the Baby Tiger don’t have cell phones, even though they spend most of their time in a cell. When I meet them, they are yawning and disarmingly kittenish, indolently draped over each other in a pair of wheeled wire cages on the back lot of the Kelly Miller Circus, an old-fashioned “mud show” that embarks from Oklahoma each February on a 10-month odyssey to pitch its tent in some of the smallest towns in this country.

Lolling nearby are Lisa the Elephant, Becky the Elephant, Tracey the Elephant, four zebras whose names I do not know, various camels, ponies, horses, goats and puppies, plus two llamas who will parade around the ring during the second act of tonight’s show, costumed (to their seeming embarrassment) as Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty. Then the entire menagerie will be trucked to the next hamlet, and the next one, day after day after day, until Thanksgiving.

As the little circus peregrinates along the byways, various agents and agencies of the U.S. government will drop in randomly and unpredictably, just as they hover, we now know, over all of us down here, taking notes every time we place a phone call, send an email, watch a video, upload a photo, enter a building, go to the mall, or get on a bus.

Meanwhile, a pride of activists, abetted by several dozen members of the United States Congress, are reprising their annual effort to ban the private ownership of tigers altogether – not to mention lions, leopards, panthers, jaguars, lynxes, cheetahs, ocelots, pumas and the last few surviving fishing cats of Cambodia. They estimate the number of big-cats-kept-as-pets in the U.S. at between 10,000 and 20,000, a spread that seems to indicate that they have no idea how many there really are.

A bill recently introduced in the House of Representatives –the Big Cats and Public Safety Protection Act – would exempt traveling circuses from this prohibition, at least temporarily. It supposedly is designed only to suppress backyard breeding and basement incarceration because, in the words of one man from the Humane Society of the United States, “dead tigers are piling up.” (Last year’s incarnation of the same bill, sponsored by no less a heavyweight than then-senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, never made it out of committee.)

So is a perilous time to be a tiger trainer in America, even when one is not alone in the ring with carnivores named Tora, Shonti, Sumsara, Nairobi, Kali, and Jai.

“Like everything else,” the trainer tells me, “the government is trying to over-regulate a small business out of existence. It’s over-reaction, and it affects the people who do things right, the people who do things humanely. As usual, they want to punish everybody for the mistakes of a few.

“If you are anybody who uses any animal — except humans, of course — you’re going to be regulated by the Department of Agriculture. They are very stringent and they show up randomly. They look at welfare of the animals, the cleanliness of your equipment, whether you give them a healthy, good lifestyle.”

“Is this what you call a healthy, good lifestyle?” I wonder. “Lying around in a cage?”

“Yes,” the trainer says. “After the tent gets set up every day, I take them in there for exercise and they basically get to run around all day. But that doesn’t matter to the activists. To them, it’s the same thing if you have a spotless record, or if you let kids play with a 400-pound animal. It’s like saying you can’t have a Maserati because theoretically it could go fast.”

The young man is billed to circus-goers as Ryan Holder. But it takes only a few clicks following our interview — using tools far less powerful than the National Security Agency is using on us — to learn that his surname is Easley, not Holder, that he has a website and a Facebook page called “ShowMe Elephants” (named for his native Missouri, the Show Me State), that he used to work for the Porsche automobile company, and that, in the words of his current boss in a Youtube video, he traded a career in luxury cars for 300 nights a year in a motorhome with six hungry tigers and a salary of $200 a week.

“You grow to love it, or to hate it,” Easley/Holder says. “I wouldn’t do anything else. I have six tigers — what else am I going to do? I’m not going to work on a factory line, putting heads on rubber dolls.”

“Are you ever scared?” I ask.

“Only of the government shutting me down,” Holder replies.

His bright-burning animals, he says, are seventh- or eighth-generation captive-born, “completely desensitized” to the crowds and the cars and their confinement. Unable to remember the dappled forests of Bengal, they have become inured to surveillance by strangers. In that reduced way, six beautiful tigers live their lives in America.